Brown Boy: Navigating Identity in a World of Misidentification by Omer Aziz
A bouncy rat-tat-tat of words came flowing out of the metro worker’s mouth as I blankly stared at her. Both of us had dark hair standing at about the same height with similar petite framing- tiny fingers and all. To many, we would be nearly indistinguishable from one another, along with the approximate 4.75 billion of us categorized as “Asian.” But as a Korean-American, turning the long Lunar New Year weekend into a fast getaway from my job in Seoul, I could only make wild guesstimates as to what the Japanese metro worker said to me. Some words sounded remarkably similar to their Korean counterpart. For a few fleeting moments, the Japanese metro worker and I became lost in a moment shaped by misidentification. Crossing my arms in a big “X” in front of my face I opted for the universal Asian body language meaning, “no.” Even though my gesture was correctly interpreted, my response there was crude at best. It could only be assumed that what I wanted to say was, “I’m sorry, I don’t speak Japanese. Incidents like these are scattered so frequently throughout Omer Aziz’s “Brown Boy” that they become the foundation of the memoir itself in a coming-of-age tale of a Pakistani-Canadian Muslim, first-gen man.
Much of Aziz’s experiences in the piece examine the trajectory of his life in the post-9/11 context, coinciding with his life history. Aziz later attends Yale Law School and becomes a foreign policy advisor to Justin Trudeau. But the onset of Islamophobia is a moment of awakening for the writer. For at least one year, the crumbling columns were mainstays on TV screens, re-traumatizing Americans to shore up support for the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan. In this moment, Aziz finds himself in the whirlwind of that very feedback loop marked by repeated misidentification, shaping his own fluid sense of self.
The prologue opens with Aziz in Israel, facing a young officer, barely eighteen or nineteen years old. Aziz looks him in the face filled with an eerie sense of possibility of what could have been. Someone he might have been a childhood friend within Toronto. Someone who “in an amusing sort of way, resembled my younger self: in an alternative universe, our positions might have been reversed.” It is precisely this disorienting mirroring that cleaves rather than heals. Aziz’s navigation of the world through multiplicities drives much of the narrative.
Early on in the memoir, however, Aziz identifies a paradox. His identity is up for dissection, precisely because he is viewed as “part of the Brown mass gathering at the barbed-wire fence of our democracies.” And while many aspects of Aziz’s existence are so carefully scrutinized according to the dictates of our colonized histories, others are seemingly muted and adrift. Awaiting entry into Jerusalem, Aziz is forced to map out his family’s lineage, complete with where they are from. With sweaty palms, he writes “British India” as his grandfather’s birthplace. Aziz answers that his family is from “Pakistan,” setting off a cascade of racing thoughts as he thinks more of how tenuous his links to his homeland are. A product of a brutal colonial regime violently breaking his connection to his history, a blank page taunts him to document these realities in his own handwriting.
While the book opens up with one of Aziz’s painful realities, much of the narrative is built around mundanity. Whether at Queen’s University as an undergrad, Paris as a study abroad student, Cambridge as a grad student, or Yale Law School, Aziz’s story tracks life as someone from the Global South navigating the Global North. Against the looming threat of being marked as a terrorist, Aziz has no choice but to constantly confront himself and the many masks he wears. He shows how the existential disfigurement born from that sadness of being perennially forced into endless liminality is carved out from macro-level clashes between the East and West. Turning his mastery of hegemonic discourse inside out, Aziz finds his way through the labyrinth of his history severed by imperialism.
Wounds abound but this isn’t a story merely about suffering. Aziz is also the master of creating and maximizing his opportunities. As someone well aware of his position within his family, the toll that immigration took on his parents, and the buried family traumas in his lineage, Aziz is motivated to intellectualize his feelings and make a palpable change. Philosophical inquiry is his tinderbox, bike rides in Cambridge become a lifeline, and heated debates a guide.
Securing a spot at Yale Law School is very much a culmination of Aziz’s resolve to bring these threads of his life and family history together. Studying foreign policy, and committing to tackling some of the world’s most pressing political problems, while honoring his family’s history is in many ways, one and the same in his story. In all instances, Aziz takes on the task of evolving. Towing his family to a new status, asking pressing questions in the face of geopolitical conflicts all while fully remaining present and vulnerable in his body.
Each step of the way, Aziz reveals something new about humanity, often dazzling in the face of something more insidious. For instance, his arrival in Amerika, the birthplace of intellectual giants such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X is seemingly in stark contrast to the scars and bleak realities searing through segregated New Haven neighborhoods. But it’s the combination of ambition, hope, and curiosity that Aziz finds his freedom.
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Brown Boy, by Omar Aziz is a Catalyst Awards nominee in the “Best Memoir” category. For more information on the book, visit Simon and Schuster. To learn more about Catalyst Award nominations, visit First Gen and Juice.